


I Will Follow You Into the Dark

by Zagzagael



Category: The Originals (TV)
Genre: #whydjadoitplec? #cantfixitwhenitsbroken #elijahmyheart #afterlifeship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-27 07:30:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18191582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: There is no fix-it fic here.Elijah considers his sins and hopes all will be forgiven.





	I Will Follow You Into the Dark

_There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.  
Aeschylus_

_Yesterday's just a memory; tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.  
Bob Dylan_

 

To have died in her arms would have been heaven. He wondered if that was his own imagined imagery or something from a pop song, a movie, a bad romance. He couldn’t tell, didn’t trust his memory any longer to try and trace the words back to a source. And who was he to dwell on Heaven? The damnation of his soul was eons in the making. Absolution a prayer to a God who had forsaken him and he forsaking in turn. 

But all this conjecture was merely a way to pass the agonizing hours until his time; his _kingdom come_ , arrived. And it would soon, soon. 

Too soon.

Not soon enough. 

) O ( 

This young woman, all earnest eyes and forward thrown shoulders and oh gods and goddesses he could see her mother in the shape of her brows, in the tilt of her broad forehead, the quirk of the corner of her bowed lips. Child mine forgive me.  
He had wanted her to have her mother’s fire. She had been a docile, obedient child, eager to please, quick to smile. Now, these years later she was only fire, nervous energy and sweltering core, sweating as a stick of dynamite can sweat. She was infinitely dangerous and now he wanted something else for her. The irony was not lost on him, that the elusive peace he had so devoutly sought for her father was the very same thing she needed. He could not give it. Not now, not ever. 

He squinted and tried to conjure a memory, something from happier times, a handful of years ago, or further back, the babe in arms, face folded in contemplation of her own fresh memory of the dark. 

Forgive me, Hayley. I cannot turn back time, my darling one, but there is the smallest amount of satisfaction knowing that you took your murderess with you, into the blazing fire of sunlight, into the blackest vale of night. 

This was the way his broken mind bled now. Convoluted memories, glimmers and flashes, pain and joy, and when joy it was followed immediately with regret and despair. He knew this was a pathological grieving and he knew he had moved beyond redemption, beyond salvation. 

He knew his purpose two-fold. He wanted to go into the dark, into the dissolution, on the merest, most unmeasurably small sliver of a chance that she might be waiting on the other side. Out of the dark and into the light. Into the sunshine of her smile, the warmth of her embrace. 

To revive in her arms…

But he also had a duty. Familial, brotherly, his heart’s career, to carry this other cursed creature out of this life and into death. Out of chaos and into peace. If he could be so bold in his desires for Niklaus. Self-redemption at long long last. A recognition of salvation. To die for another, to give up all that he held most sacred for a calling even higher. Love. That was his estimation of Klaus’s act, his choice. And he approved whole-heartedly. 

But what of his own desire, his longing? He was holding that at bay, holding that beside him, packed away. 

The wish ceremony. He smiled, thinking of Bex and her sincerity, all her wishes were one wish. Happiness and peace for those she loved, even her own battered and bruised self. Seeking calm in a maelstrom. She had never been a sailor, his sister.  
He wanted that for her. Niklaus had confided his request for the cure. He approved. Of course, he did. His heart already reaching out into the future for a human, dying Rebekah and her long-grieved husband.

) O (

He wanted to spare Niklaus. Go into the dark alone. Let the child have one parent, at least. He wanted to be the sensible one who made the choice, took the stake, removed the diseased and rotten member from the body whole. But the gods were not having it. Klaus was his own jury, judge and executioner and that was the end of his story. Both their stories, truly, but perhaps his was writ by his own hand, he was the one who had begged Marcel and Vincent to wipe his mind clean with the bleached rag, the toxic magic, the compulsion. He gagged just thinking of it. 

Why, my sweet girl, didn’t I see the foretelling, the future of the act, the consequences. I was selfish. And this act is selfishness, too. I cannot exist without you. I won’t. 

) O (

The sky was exploding. No, that wasn’t right. His heart had imploded. His bones shattering, the confetti of his dead self, thrown into the night’s sky. Klaus grey and stiff with his leaving. The body he had carried on his back for a thousand years a thing he could put down if he only had arms left, hands to lift and lower. He had none of these. He was dissolving, the aether calling to him, through the wide-awake slumber of this dying and into the dream of death. He closed his eyes, Niklaus already gone, the world already transforming, energy begetting energy. In that moment, the last of cerebral clarity, he wanted to be enveloped into a forever night, the darkness soothing away the smallest vestige of fear, that sense of panic calmed out of him, the letting go, the letting, the

End.


End file.
